Recent reviews by Customs Officer

The gameplay is very poor for an RPG. It's too simple, the character development is not interesting, and it's exceedingly easy.

I hate all the characters. Even Alistair, the one all the girls had a crush on, is very stupid and annoying. Also the redhead girl people like is also dense and overtly gay. Gay religious people are not edgy in worlds where homosexuality is permitted by religion. You are not being edgy.

The religion is detailed everywhere constantly, but nothing is special about this religion. You just pray to the god and be pious at church with nuns. It's the only religion in the entire world of many races and nations, it's extremely bland, and it's unlike any religion in the real world with no debatable topics, common heresies, cults, etc. They did not have to make so many codex entries about this. I already know what a generic fantasy religion is.

The story is the worst part. It's generic. It plays hard into all the tropes without any skill, deconstruction, or self-awareness. The edgy possessed toddler boss fight was so cringy. It caused me psychic damage. I'll be kind of nice and admit the tutorial for human mage was a little interesting with a fun twist and some Bioware-tier moral quandaries, but as the tutorial is not very long, I still cannot scrounge together a full hour of entertainment from this AAA, mass-marketed game.

Someone told me this was as good as Mass Effect but in a fantasy setting. No! Garrus and Tali are such complex and endearing characters. Mass Effect has not aged well enough for me to ever want to play it again, but it could not have been this boring and unable to be funny. Mass Effect youtube poops still make me laugh. This game could never make me laugh.

I played it for 80 hours to make sure I hate it, and these are my conclusions. Yes. I don't recommend this game, even at my price of $7 for full DLC.

Works great on Steam Deck. Works well in Linux. Fast travel crashes, but if you use "echo 1000000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count" in your terminal before starting the game, you can fast travel just fine.

Thanks for bringing the Harvest Moon genre to PC!

(If you are looking for Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you will be extremely disappointed. This game has nothing in common. If you are looking for 3D Stardew Valley, you will also be disappointed. Look at Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons.)

The main focus is exploration. You will spend most of your time walking, picking up resources, and completing resource-retrieval quests or go-talk-to-X quests. Progression is exploration-and-crafting-based. The more sprites you find around the game, the more areas they can unlock for you. You also can reach more places by crafting bridges, etc. Crafting is very simple - just pick up everything you walk past and click on stuff in the crafting menu.

There is no combat, which is great because 'cozy' games with combat usually involve obnoxious buttonmashing. There is no currency. Instead, you barter items for items. It's good because it encourages you to keep and use your items instead of stockpiling gold. It's bad because merchants only carry small amounts of random items and are distantly scattered across the map, so you can't reliably bulk-buy twine or rocks or whatever.

Pros
~Cute details, simple humor
~Low stakes, easy game. No death states, item loss, QTE spamming, etc.

Cons
~No real depth. Everyone is kind of nice, kind of silly, or kind of pleasant. Areas have different trees, flowers, and specialize in a different trade, but you will be doing the same things no matter where you go or when you go.

EDIT: I will play it again and reassess.

Oblivion and Morrowind are two of my favorite games. They are fun-spirited, richly detailed, and have large modding communities. Skyrim hits none of these high notes. The game consistently takes itself too seriously, presents the bulk of its content upfront like an amusement park ride, and actively split up modding efforts between versions and platforms.

overly serious
Most NPCs are conventionally attractive, all dialogue is flatly heroic, and each story has to throw in some kind of epic twist or high stakes. These goals are so far out of Bethesda's league that the end result is tiresome. Without humor (intentional jokes and quirks, not talking about bugs), the charm of these games is stripped away. Skyrim is hardly imaginative enough to make up for it, Ancient Markarth holds little wonder compared to the whimsical architecture and fashion favored by Morrowind’s Telvanni faction.

The “endless procedurally-generated quests” are especially dull. They add nameless NPCs and generic items to the game for you to carry out stupidly easy and meaningless tasks.

flat
Morrowind had plenty of political intrigue and richly illustrated factions to add depth to quests and areas. Oblivion tucked all kinds of secrets into NPC homes and daily schedules, so you are rewarded for doing self-guided investigations. Skyrim doesn't feel set up for deep exploration. As you enter towns, NPCs are set up like props and will repeat a few brief lines to give you a sense of their life and the local culture. Their schedules are very simple, so they'll likely still be there after you come back and repeat the same lines over again.

anti-modding
A lot of my favorite long-time modders quit because of how Skyrim was managed. Vanilla and SE are not compatible. Nexus and alternatives were discouraged, and modders are funneled onto Steam Workshop then Bethesda's personal platform. Another round of mod monetization drama passed through. Even though mods and Bethesda are synonymous, Skyrim has a discordant history towards its community. There's still plenty of mods to try out there, but the pool is a shadow of what it would have been at this point.

pros

• One of the best entries for roleplaying. You can live with your housecarl and spouse, direct your followers to sit in chairs, buy food and drinks at the inns, perform some manual labor for honest pay, and cook in your home for your loved ones.
  
• The dungeons are individualized and beautiful. The puzzles may have nothing on Morrowind’s mazes and spell puzzles, but beauty is beauty.
  
• Reverse-pickpocketing poisons
  
• Dual-wielding, greater weapon variety than Oblivion

cons

• Kind of boring and forgettable
  
• Meaningless character progression. No choices, everyone can do everything, gameplay never really changes from swing swords and casting damage spells. The game is just really easy, too.
  
• No dragon riding. They say there will be dragon riding, but the screen cuts to black then you arrive at the next location. (I think dragon riding got added in a later DLC?)

Overall, the structured experiences in Skyrim left a bad taste in my mouth. Skyrim can't touch Oblivion or Morrowind, but it's worth roleplaying in.

Thank you so much, Capcom, for this flawless PC port with no additional DRM.

This game makes use of the videogame medium like no other. Games are replayable, social, and explorable. Dragon's Dogma utilizes these idiosyncrasies perfectly in the best game of this decade filled with thrilling combat, lore, and humor.

replayability
Most games include New Game+ as an extra, but Dragon's Dogma’s story is told in an infinite cycle. If you like to minmax, make unique characters, collect all the fashion items, unlock all the crafting recipes, pursue your one true Beloved, or just analyze a rich story and setting, you will replay the game many times. Initially, bandits will be nearly impossible to fight, but your character will be mowing through them before NG+. However, there will be a few challenges even after a NG+ or two in the main campaign. Bitterblack Isle and the Ur-Dragon, will be challenging even at max level. Nothing besides your personal ability stops you from entering any area or facing anything, though.

single-player with optional pawn trading
This is a single-player game with online connectivity. (Offline with pre-made pawns is always an option.) As the Arisen, you will have complete control over the development of one fully-customizable party member known as a Pawn. It will fight by your side, learn from the behaviors you exhibit (if you loot everything, your pawn will learn to loot everything), study monsters through battle, and automatically be hireable for RC by other players to benefit from your training. If that other player shows your Pawn a new strategy, it will bring the new information home. The Pawn system also allows for reviewing with helpful/funny preset comments and trading via gifts. This way, you can actually earn recognition for the Utilitarian/Challenge pawn with a Triple-Dragonforged Delta Guard.

exploration
I’m still learning things after hundreds of hours across platforms! The map is big and extends far beyond the scope of the story. It also has a lot of hidden verticality for bizarrely competent platforming. The From a Different Sky quests really highlight this feature. If you like lore and story, Dragon’s Dogma has an inexhaustible amount of lore to investigate. The setting of Gransys has a rich history, evidenced in the variances of architecture, quest and NPC dialogue, and the costumes of the other Arisens. The characters are all interdependent and political.

Many people accuse the game of having minimal story. It’s true that the main story line dialogue is mostly to-the-point about you being an undead hero of prophecy come to rid the land of an ancient dragon (or just run some errands for the Duke who wishes to delay you at all costs). However, dig deeper into their motivations and relationships, and there is definitely plenty of story. They don't spell everything out for you.

best combat ever, easily in line with Monster Hunter or Dark Souls
Today, my Arisen oiled the wings of a Griffon with arrows, and grasped onto its legs as it lifted from the ground to flee. Holding on for dear life as the Griffon was gaining altitude, my Arisen gained a firm grip and drove fiery daggers into the beast’s flesh until both its wings were set ablaze. She rode the burning griffon to the ground where her pawns finished it off. I was so scared the whole time that I’d lose my grip. That wasn’t even a quest, just a random encounter.

romance
Dragon’s Dogma subverts the Damsel in Distress cliché. The Arisen can be male or female, and the “damsel” can be nearly any NPC in the game. By any, I mean you can seriously accidentally get married to gross old men, pre-married women, and children. There are tricks to getting who you want, but something always seems to go wrong and you end up with Fournival or Caxton as your Beloved. It lends some anticipation for the climax cutscene.

ridiculous people
The characters are as ridiculous as the dialogue. The cast includes a foreign rich girl who pretends to be a knight, an overly flirtacious girl who opens a shop with access to an exclusive master weaponsmith through unreturned favors, a villager who pretends to be an adventurer only to die along the easiest paths (voiced by Vic Mignogna no less! haha!), a rarity trader who frequents the local counterfeiter, the dreamy Night’s Champion, and so many others.

In short, buy this game immediately. You are missing out every second you don't!

Although I may view other games as being objectively better, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the single-player game I will always go back to.

Bethesda tried to recreate little parts of reality in the interactions between customized NPCs and their scheduled AI. They failed horribly and created instead listless deformed humanoids that lack the intelligence to do little more than bump into one another and echo the same conversation they heard from their previous collision. They lack the social awareness not to steal apples in front of a crowd of guards, nonchalantly stumble over corpses in the town square, or calmly approach a man wearing the recently murdered Emperor's robes.

These NPCs do not resemble human beings at all, questionably apart from their character models. They are insane, compulsive, and often ghoulish creatures. (Searching through random NPC houses will commonly unearth status within the Mythic Dawn, Dread Father shrines, and other signs of repulsive activity.) It is inspiring in a way to see a thing so close yet so distant in reference to human society.

Bethesda realized all of this in a moment of unbearably historic revelation and started work on the game that marks their self-actualization -- Shivering Isles. The people of Sheogorath's realm are each driven mad and suffer from individualistic fixations. Creating a society of manic and demented people is precisely what Bethesda was meant to do with their perfect skillset of idiosyncratic writing, AI that requires specific targets and times, awkward animations, and ugly character models. Instead of accidentally creating a weird RPG, they intentionally directed their labor to the highest-valued function.

As a whole, there is an impossible amount of content to experience. For nearly 10 years of consistent play, every new game has revealed new quests (some that don't appear in the journal) that I somehow missed. The quests are consistently hilarious. Exploring is vastly rewarding, as you can discover schedules, backgrounds, and dark secrets of NPCs. There are a fair amount of treasure and unique items hidden about the world, as well. (This contrasts with Skyrim's limited content that ends in repeating quests and NPCs that reveal all there is to know about themselves in 20 minutes of town dialogue.)

pros
~artistic risk-taking gamedev - radiantAI, NPC schedules, etc
~highly moddable. The devs pretty much used the Construction Kit to make Oblivion.
~personal favorite TES soundtrack right here

cons
~worst TES world. It's really just a fantasy forest.
~cookie-cutter dungeons. You don't need to go in very many anyway.
~rumors are oft repeated
~the combat and character progression are stupid. But if you are playing Oblivion for the combat...(LOL)
~ugly clothes and armor, compared to Daggerfall and Morrowind